In The Studio: Spring King

With the circus surrounding their debut quietening down, Spring King are hard at work on the follow-up.

Published: 8:00 am, August 31, 2017

Last year Spring King released their debut album ‘Tell Me If You Like To'. The record may have looked at identity, feelings of loss, uncertainty and wondered where they fit in but the band quickly found their place as leaders of a new wave.

Now they're looking at where we go next.

"I feel like I lost my mind on the last album," grins Tarek. "The whole Beats1 thing happened, there were loads of labels coming up from above the water, we'd already done the album but I was mixing it, and we'd just been signed. They hadn't heard it, and they weren't going to hear it until it was fully mixed. It was such chaos. We'd just come off tour, then two days after we were in the studio scrambling for gear. We didn't have any proper equipment."

"It was a crazy time," agrees Pete. "But I'm so proud of what we did." Sat backstage at 2000trees, it's an hour after their main stage slot - one of only a handful of live appearances the band are making this summer as they focus on the new. They're currently deep in the middle of album two, and everything has changed.

"My house that I wrote the last album in got demolished [by developers, not gargantuan riffs though you wouldn't put it past them] so now we're in a new space in London, which is weird because I'm used to writing in the countryside outside Manchester. We're pitching up there for the next four months. With the debut, because we were young, we wanted to get something out and just get the ball rolling. We're going to take our time on this one."

"We're still really pleased with the first record; it's just that we did it in three weeks. We didn't have time to think. We did it between two tours." The band have been in the studio since May. In those two months, Tarek, Andy, Pete and James have already got 40 odd songs down in various stages of completion. "Sometimes you get in the studio, and nothing comes out. It's crap. And sometimes you have moments where it all happens," starts Pete.
"Last week James and I went into the studio, we had three songs in six minutes," grins Tarek.

"pull" text="I lost my mind on the last album.

The idea was, "Let's focus in and see what we can do if we gave ourselves some more time. Also, we're trying to write more as a group now." Before, they were Tarek's songs with a little flavour from everyone else. Now everyone's cooking. "We wanted to at least give it a try and see how the four of us could work together. It's been a learning curve, so we wanted a bit more time to explore it," explains Pete, before letting his guard down. "I feel quietly confident about what we have. I was listening through the other day and thought, ‘Wow, this is really good', so… It's still early days, but we are progressing with it quite quickly."

"It was important for us to take a step back," continues Tarek. "We didn't want to make the same record again. We wanted to magnify some of the stuff we love about the first album. When you play songs again and again, you realise some things weren't quite right, or some things work really well, and you want to enjoy them again."
The other day the band took to their stack of forty new ideas with a blade. "We dwindled it down to 21 that we're happy with so far." They've still got another month of exploring before they properly get into it, "but I feel really good."

"At first we were scared to commit, ‘Let's just get everything down. Let's not be too critical. If it's a cheesy riff, let's go with it. If it's something left-field, let's go with it'. We still write very, very quickly but for us now, it's about asking what's the overall vision for the record. What do we want it to be? We can do various things, but it's about working out how far we want to change things, or if we want to change things. The first record, it's unified in its sound, but it is varied. Do we want to take one of those ideas and go with that, or do we want to keep on with that varied nature? These are the things we talk about, and we haven't decided yet. A lot of it is conversations and asking questions," explains Pete.

There are conversations about where music is at and where it's going, but as much as they intellectualise it, excitement comes first.

"A lot of it is feeling," Tarek continues. "How do we feel? Do we feel excited by that song or that riff? We can write so much material, but you have to sit back and ask, well, what does this represent? What does this do? As long as the song feels good, it gets put in a pile."

"We could think about this all day long, but we just go with what feels good. Humans are never going to completely buy into something if it's thrown down their throats. They know when something is bullshit. Whether it's a new idea or a rehash of something else, people are going to listen to good music."

"A tune is a tune; it doesn't matter what instrument plays it," reasons Pete. "I do ask myself how you make guitar sound new but also, do they need to sound new? I'm trying to push what I can do on a guitar further than what I've been doing in the past. Hopefully it brings a new flavour to what we're doing."

"pull" text="We want to get the album out early next year.

Lyrically album two is being influenced by the world at large. "I feel like everything is fucked," starts Tarek. "The situation is fucked, but there is hope underneath. Take the recent elections, yeah Labour didn't win, but there's such a strong swing that next time around, that's it. Someone on our Instagram was like, ‘Stay out of politics and stick to music'. Fuck off; music has always been politics. Music is politics. In every single way. I don't think the two are separate. Whatever you sing about is what you represent, you have your heart on your sleeve no matter what you're talking about. There's definitely such a strong scene for what we're doing, and we love that. We want to build on that and stay with those people."

The band want new music out this year alongside a tour. As for the album, "We want to get it out early next year, so whatever it takes. We've got the studio for another few months, so it's up to us how long we continue to write for because we've already got two-to-three albums' worth of songs. Some of them are definitely going to make the record but then but then it's a choice about what you want the story of the record to be. We have a lot to think about, but it sounds really good. We're feeling very confident with it. We'll see in a few months though. I'm sure we'll lose our minds at some point with it."